Mobility of large amounts of data and applications is becoming increasingly important as the size of typical applications and associated files within a user's computing environment is ever increasing. A user's computing environment is defined herein as data and/or programs associated with a particular user that allow the user to interact with a computer in a particular fashion. An example of this may include a user's operating system, software applications and data stored on a disk. It has become commonplace for mobile computer users to carry laptops to bring their computing environments with them. In many cases, this arrangement is less than optimal. Laptops are heavy, bulky, fragile, and subject to theft. Moreover, the user cannot easily choose a computer with resources appropriate to the task at hand. Instead, a single laptop must suffice for everything. Roaming profiles as they exist in the MICROSOFT WINDOWS® operating system today do not solve this problem. The performance of the required remote file access is often insufficient and in practice only a fraction of the user's computing environment is actually ported from desktop to desktop. For example, application settings might move but not applications or the “My Documents” folder.
Remote desktop (terminal server) programs are not a full solution either, since desktop-remoting is not always workable over high-latency lines and the protocols involved are often blocked by firewalls. Moreover, in many environments users maintain personal control over their desktops which makes such machines an unreliable target for remote access.
The advent of cheap, portable, particularly flash-based storage devices, offers the possibility of carrying a computing environment on one's keychain or in a mobile phone. Familiar flash devices can be used for this purpose as they easily plug-in to desktop hardware that is becoming both cheap and ubiquitous.
However, it doesn't work well to treat the flash device as a desktop primary disk. Booting from flash devices is generally not supported. It is not desirable that the flash device dictate the configuration of the host computer since the flash device will often be used in concert with different host hardware configurations. Flash devices can be easily lost or damaged, and therefore a strong backup strategy is needed. Furthermore, rotating disk hardware will outpace solid-state hardware in bytes per unit cost for some time to come. Therefore, it is arguable whether limited space flash devices will ever have acceptable capacity compared to desktop or laptop disks.
In view of the above problems, it would be beneficial to utilize portable memory devices to enable users to carry with them their computing environment without having to store the entire contents of the computing environment on the portable memory device. It would be yet be a further advantage to have an automatic backup facility in connection with using the portable memory device.